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When the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, the liberties it provided were withheld from the hundreds of thousands of Africans living in slavery. In a public letter to Thomas Jefferson, a free African-American Benjamin Banneker challeneged the treatment of blacks and the continued existence of slavery.

Accounts from the crisis that unfolds in Little Rock, Arkansas when black students attend the previously all-white Central High School. Accounts from the crisis that unfolds in Little Rock, Arkansas when black students attend the previously all-white Central High School.

Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian women artist, was voluntarily interned with 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps in 1942. There, she recorded the deprivations and rigors of camp life with unusual insight.

Using the Fernald School--a Waltham, Mass. institution in which children labeled as “feeble-minded” were confined by the state government--as a case study, this news segment examines the history of eugenics.

State Senator Charles Caldwell was a former slave who had led a company of African American soldiers, earlier in 1875, in a state militia formed to protect freedpeople from the White Line. The militia was later disbanded by the governor as part of a “peace agreement” with the White Line, but attacks and intimidation continued, and Caldwell himself was assassinated later that year. Eugene Welborne, who served as Caldwell’s first lieutenant in the militia, gave this account of election day in November 1875 in Clinton, Mississippi, and Caldwell’s efforts to ensure a fair vote.